Fanwood restoring caboose to highlight ties to history, Central Railroad of New Jersey

FANWOOD — A pair of eyes spray-painted on either side of the door of a rusting caboose in Fanwood peer out at the rail line that ran back and forth between Jersey City and Pennsylvania decades ago.

But while the graffiti-covered rail car sits on a heavy-duty flatbed trailer in the recycling yard the borough shares with Scotch Plains, it is not bound for the scrapper’s torch.

Three years ago Fanwood won a $100,000 grant from the state Department of Transportation to preserve the caboose.

Today, the borough will consider bids for its exterior restoration.

Mayor Colleen Mahr said the caboose would make a fine addition to the Fanwood Museum, located in the Fanwood station, the oldest rail structure in Union County.

“I don’t know how many towns have a museum like we do,” she said. “It’s all an effort to bring the economic redevelopment to the cultural, to the historical and slowly march toward what people want — a destination.”

The 25-ton caboose was rescued by Fanwood police Sgt. Tom Jedic after the United Railroad Historical Society of New Jersey was forced to move their stored equipment from a PSE&G powerplant yard in Ridgefield Park.

Getting the caboose from the rail spur at the power plant to Fanwood took three years.
Jedic said it required chopping down trees that had grown between the tracks over two decades and getting permission from the Federal Railroad Administration to pull the deteriorating caboose on an active right of way.

“It’s been frustrating, but I know that someday I’m going to walk past there and it’s going to be sitting by the train station from 1874 and it’ll be beautiful and well worth it,” said Jedic, 49, who started bicycling around Union County with his friends and photographing trains when he was 8.

He hopes the restoration will take about a year once the work begins.

Fanwood’s history is tied to the Central Railroad of New Jersey, which operated from 1839 until 1976 when the bankrupt operation was subsumed into Conrail. The borough was formed by residents of a community that sprang up around the new station when it was constructed in 1874, Jedic said. A railroad-owned company also bought up much of the land along the tracks and marketed it to wealthy people desiring an escape from hectic city life, Jedic said.

The caboose was one of 50 built in 1943 for the Central Railroad of New Jersey. It was retired in 1979.

It functioned as the office of the train’s conductor, boasting a pot-belly stove, lockers, a small desk and an observation cupola where crew members could spot train cars showering sparks from seized wheel bearings or brakes.

The volunteers led by Jedic are barred by the grant from doing any of the sandblasting or restoration work, so they are reaching out to anyone with old photographs and documents from the Central Railroad of New Jersey.

“Our goal is to display them in here so that on the days when the museum is open, they’ll learn about railroading, learn about the history they probably drive past each day and don’t think about,” Jedic said.